Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem's First Decade

by Toi Derricotte (Editor), Cornelius Eady (Editor), Camille T. Dungy (Editor)

Cave Canem has for the past ten years dedicated itself to the discovery and cultivation of new voices in African American poetry. Founded in 1996 by prizewinning poets Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady, Cave Canem began as a weeklong summer workshop/retreat and has now expanded to include regional workshops, poetry readings, a series of public conversations between major poets and emerging younger poets, and an annual first-book prize.

To mark the first decade of this pathbreaking project, Gathering Ground presents more than one hundred poems by Cave Canem participants and faculty. It embraces an impressive and eclectic gathering of forms, including sonnets, a bop (a new form created by a Cave Canem faculty member), blues, sestinas, prose poems, centos, free verse, and more. The roster of distinguished contributors includes Lucille Clifton, Yusef Komunyakaa, Marilyn Nelson, Sonya Sanchez, Al Young, and many others.

For newcomers and aficionados alike, Gathering Ground assembles in one place the most innovative voices in contemporary African American poetry and boldly attests to the important position it holds in verse-making today.

Toi Derricotte is author of the memoir The Black Notebooks and of four books of Tender , Captivity , Natural Birth , and The Empress of the Death House . She is Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. Cornelius Eady is the author of Brutal Imagination , Autobiography of a Jukebox , You Don't Miss Your Water , The Gathering of My Name , and Victims of the Latest Dance Craze . He is Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame.

Genres: Poetry

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Toi Derricotte is the author of The Undertaker’s Daughter (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011) and four earlier collections of poetry, including Tender, winner of the 1998 Paterson Poetry Prize. Her literary memoir, The Black Notebooks (W.W. Norton), received the 1998 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Non-Fiction and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her honors include, among many others, the 2012 Paterson Poetry Prize for Sustained Literary Achievement, the 2012 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, two Pushcart Prizes and the Distinguished Pioneering of the Arts Award from the United Black Artists.

Derricotte is the co-founder of Cave Canem Foundation (with Cornelius Eady), Professor Emerita at the University of Pittsburgh and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Reviews

[Jennifer Collins]

As an incredibly varied anthology of poems, this work serves up poems from familiar names alongside poets who most poetry readers won't be familiar with, and the result is a fresh collection of voices that pops with style, meaning, and memorable lines. The variations in style and voice mean that, more than likely, any one reader won't be blown away by each poem in the book, but at the same time, it's hard to imagine the reader that won't be struck by multiple pieces here, to the point of wanting to read them over and share them, again and again.

Among the many poets represented here, some of my all-time favorite voices are represented--including Yusef Komunyakaa, A. Van Jordan, Patricia Smith, Regie O'Hare Gibson, Aracelis Girmay, Kevin Young, and Lucille Clifton. But even as someone who reads poetry constantly, in both collections and journals, there are names here that I've never heard, and that I've discovered as new favorites who I'll be seeking out more work from. Each reader is sure to find their own favorites, and line upon line that resonates with them.

Absolutely recommended.

[ryo narasaki · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had been losing earshot of my own voice recently, and this was the best medicine! Aside from that, though, this is a valuable book because it also includes intro essays by the founders of Cave Canem, Cornelius Eady and Toi Dericotte, as well as Harryette Mullen and Elizabeth Alexander. The diversity in this collection is really awesome, and it's really refreshing to see so many different talents, skills, and voices.